Christmas Through and Through, Volume Three

It's that time of year again! Today's post is Christmastime, all the time. 

I'm going to start with my very favorite type of Christmas tape to find - the home recording of a family members enjoying Christmas and/or Christmas music. In this case, it's The Van Sickle Family, singing their way through about a half hour of Christmas songs and a variety of other songs. Along the way, a very small child recites "A Visit From St. Nicholas", with some help. Technically, only about half of this tape is Christamassy, but "Christmas Nearly Through and Through" doesn't have the same ring to it. 

The family members heard here are not the greatest home recorded singers you'll hear on this site (in fact, in comparison, I have some wonderful, if ragged, harmony singing cued up for an upcoming post) from a different family - but the love and fondness and good feelings come through in every moment of this tape. (And despite what it says at the very beginning, this is not Jeannie's birthday party.) 

I can't find the tape box for this one right now, but it did indicate that these recordings were made, for the most part, in 1951. 

Download: The Van Sickle Family - Christmas Songs and Other Old Favorites, Recorded Mostly in 1951

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This next recording would, under other circumstances, be my lead offering for certain. However, this material - including its video - has been made available commercially in the past. BUT, I'm including it here because this recording contains the original commercials, and that's always interesting to hear. 

Anyway, it is the sound, recorded off of TV, of Bing Crosby's very first Television Christmas Special, from December 11, 1961. Crosby, of course, continued to host these shows, off and on, for the next 16 years, even managing to host such a show in 1977 several weeks after he had died. 

Anyway, the commercials here are few and far between, but hopefully their presence leads you to agree that this recording was worth sharing. 

Download: Bing Crosby TV Christmas Special - 12-11-61, on ABC

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This one is labeled "A Christmastime Audio Letter to Larry from Charles", and I will let it's charms soothe you without further comment.

Download: A Christmastime Audio Letter to Larry from Charles

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This next one is pretty dang esoteric, and also only partly qualifies as a Christmas-related recording. I've named it "Presentation On Behalf of a Fluxgate Compass Manufacturer, and Recordings Made at That Company's 1951 Christmas Party". The two segments of this 19 minute tape are each almost exactly half of the recording. I am not sure who the man giving the presentation was presenting to, but he hems and haws quite a bit and seems to be speaking off the top of his head. It's a fairly difficult listen. After nine minutes - and the man doesn't appear to be done speaking - we move onto the party, which is considerably more entertaining, with a series of employees doing whatever the term is for the audio version of "mugging for the camera".

Download: Presentation On Behalf of a Fluxgate Compass Manufacturer, and Recordings Made at That Company's 1951 Christmas Party

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Next up, featuring vintage excerpts I found - about 11 minutes worth - of a Lawrence Well Christmas episode. 

Download: Excerpts from a Lawrence Welk Christmas Episode

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And now for an "Acetate of the Month". This brief, unlabeled acetate contains a female lead singer, with chorus, singing "White Christmas on one side, clearly recorded off of the radio. Here it is: 

Download: Unlabeled Black Acetate - Female Vocal with Chorus - White Christmas

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The flip side of this record will not play all the way through. But for completeness sake (even though it's also not Christmassy, here is that 42 second segment: 

Download: Unlabeled Black Acetate - Flip Side of "White Christmas" - Only Partially Playable

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And I'm going to finish this post with a slightly expanded "Very Short Reel" They are usually under five minutes, but I wanted to include one for Christmas, and this one is about seven minutes. It's just a few conversations recorded in someone's home on Christmas. 

Enjoy!

Download: Unknown - Conversations on Christmas

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Christmastime Is Here

 Seasoned Gratings!!!!

For this last post of the year, I'm going to focus almost entirely on Christmas and New Years, with only an exception for my weekly "very short reel" - and a bizarre one of those, at that. 

First, as I've done every year on this blog, I have a recording of a family celebrating Christmas at home. In this case, it is among the earliest, if not the earliest, Christmas recording I have featured, as the box makes it clear that we are hearing "Christmas, 1954", at a house on "River Road, Chatham, New Jersey". See?: 

There is some wonderfully charming stuff here, mixed in amidst the general conversations, package opening, and (unfortunately, in this case) moments of poor recording quality. I particularly enjoy the music, although the final segment of singing in marred by someone who decided to add a vocal version of stand-up double bass accompaniment, and did so as loudly as the piano and singer, essentially ruining the entire segment. 

Travel back in time almost exactly 67 years, and enjoy a family Christmas celebration. 

Download: Christmas, 1954, at River Road, Chatham, New Jersey

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In a moment, I will have my usual "Acetate of the Month", but first, I have something of a mix between my usual posts and that feature - here is a reel of tape I found, in which someone made a tape of an acetate that he found.

The man who is speaking (Rex, in St. Louis) was almost certainly part of a "tape exchange" club of some sort, probably the type (which I've learned was quite a thing, in the '70's and '80's), in which members exchanged tapes of old time radio. What the speaker has found, as you'll hear, is an acetate someone made on Christmas of 1953, in the Philadelphia area. The person spun the radio dial and picked up nearly 20 minutes of Christmas programming on that day. An enjoyable little diversion from nearly 68 years ago. 

Download: Scanning the Radio Dial on Christmas, 1953

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And now here's that Acetate of the Month. And in this case, it's a lengthy one, recorded at 33 1/3 RPM on both sides of a ten inch acetate. And this one is from a Christmas party. Specifically, a Christmas party held by the employees of a local post office, in December of 1960: 

Aside from saying that there are moments here which are quite affecting, I believe I will let this recording, which is about 25 minutes long, total, speak for itself: 

Download: Post Office Party, December, 1960, Side One

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Download: Post Office Party, December, 1960, Side Two

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Moving on from Christmas to New Year's Eve, what I have here are a few fragments from a top 40 radio New Year's Eve countdown, as 1964 became 1965. I deeply wish I could share the entire countdown with you, but our intrepid tape operator, whoever he or she was, was one of those people who desperately wanted to avoid getting the DJ's voice, so although the entire top 25 of the year (for this station), the DJ patter (and that of a supremely annoying sidekick named Bruno) is only audible before the # 1 song. The rest of the songs literally cut on after they start, and cut off before they end. 

It's an unusual top 25, too, at least when compared to where some of these songs charted nationally that year. # 25 is a version of "Shenandoah" that, as far as my chart books indicate, never hit the charts nationally at all. Other songs which seem to have been MUCH bigger locally than nationally were. The numbers in parenthesis are the songs' national peak - not year end, but just regular run - on the Billboard Hot 100: 

# 20 - No Particular Place to Go (10)

# 16 - In the Misty Moonlight (19)

# 13 - Haunted House (11)

# 12 - Chug-a-Lug (9)

and

# 3 - Nadine (Is It You?) (23)

Only two of the above made Billboard's Top 100 of the year ("Haunted House" and "Chug-a-Lug", and neither of those made the top 60. 

And I love Chuck Berry, and wish his comeback in 1964 had been big enough that he'd had two of the 20 biggest hits of the year nationally, but that was not close to being the case!

Anyway, the station is KXOK, in St. Louis (which helps explain the Chuck Berry songs placing so high). All I have here is the # 1 song (which should surprise no one), with part of its introduction, then a recap of then-recent presidential election. Then there is some talk about the new year ringing in around the world (and an atomic clock counting the seconds), followed by the final seconds of 1964, counting down to 1965 for St. Louis. This is followed by the first song played in the new year, a bit of DJ patter and the start of the next song - "Shake a Tail Feather" by the Du-Tones - a top 60 hit nationally in 1963, but probably a bigger hit on KXOK, as the group was from.... St. Louis. 

Download: 1964 Becomes 1965 on KXOK, St Louis

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And now it's time for that very bizarre, and "very short" reel. What you're about to hear is contained on perhaps 30 or 40 feet of tape - if that - which I found spliced to the end of a large reel of leader tape. 

The first half of its 82 seconds is mostly some sort of white noise. There is something going on faintly beneath the noise, but not much. But precisely halfway through, there is a great bit of vocal noise,  followed by a young person speaking in a foreign language. I believe it's French, but I don't speak that language, and with the white noise persisting throughout, so I'm not even sure I'm right about the language. Maybe someone out there can assist in identifying what's being said. 

Anyway, this little hunk of tape sure fascinates me. 

Download: A Remarkably Odd Piece of Tape

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And finally, those of you who have been reading my posts for the last few years know that my family uses the Christmas Card tradition to engage in a bit of performance art each year. Previous end-of-the-year posts have other examples, and now, here is the latest in the series: 

From the left, that's me, my wife with the marshmallow in her face, then our two adult kids, and on the right, the fellow who will soon be, variously, husband, son-in-law and brother-in-law to the rest of the individuals in the photo.